Mark Kurlansky's "The Food of a Younger Land"

In the 1930s, writers for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) chronicled the eating habits of Americans. Here are some Vermont excerpts, as collected in Mark Kurlansky’s The Food of a Younger Land:

Farmers' Kitchen—Farm & Ferment

Our farm is centered around regeneration, inspired by Rudolf Steiner and more recent developments in the rebuilding of high-functioning soils and plants. We regard our farm as a self-contained entity, with its own organ systems (microbes, fungi, cattle, etc.), character, economic, social, and ecological life.

A Localvore’s Dilemma

It’s a sign of the maturity of Vermont’s sustainable agriculture and local foods movement that this has become a prevalent and perplexing question. Is it better to buy a local, organic carrot or one that’s just local? Even more challenging, is it better to buy a local, conventionally grown carrot, or an organic carrot from far away?

Reflections of a Restaurateur | Part 4

One of Thomas Jefferson’s favorite snacks was anchovy deviled eggs. He was also wild about fresh peas, and several of his surviving handwritten recipes are for creamy French desserts. I know this because at my Montpelier restaurant, Salt, we once spent several weeks cooking and serving dishes that were common at fancy Monticello dinner parties or inspired by the late president’s extensive garden.

Set the Table with…Cranberries

The Land of Bog is a mysterious world of acidic, sandy peat soil and an abundance of water. Here live the cranberries: low-trailing vines with small evergreen leaves and tart, wine-colored berries. They are wise and venerable plants that theoretically can live forever; some cranberries on Cape Cod are more than 150 years old.

Eat Right

If you haven’t eaten at your local hospital lately, you don’t know what you’re missing. No, seriously! Over the past few years, Vermont medical facilities have traded in their Fry-o-lators for sauté pans, canned and processed foods for local and organic fruits and veggies, and sugary soft drinks for lightly sweetened iced teas.

A Mobile Market Finds Its Way

A little after 10:00 a.m. on a chilly October morning in Newport, the traffic at the intersection of Main street and Coventry street is as steady as usual. Traffic lights turn, some cars move, others stop; the rhythm of routine here is strong. But at the edge of this routine, along the curb, Meghan Stotko is doing something eye-catching: building a multi-tiered display of local food that’s part billboard, part art installation.

Barnstorming

Barns, of course, are a staple in Vermont agriculture, providing a place to house livestock, store hay and grain, and keep farm vehicles and equipment. Unfortunately, though, their upkeep can be dauntingly expensive and time consuming, especially with cows to milk and food to produce.

Inviting the Pollinators

Several years ago I was privileged to spend weeks and months at a time working in southern Mexico with organic coffee and cacao farmers. My first visit to a coffee farm is etched in my memory primarily through sound—the sound of bees.

Editor's Note Winter 2013

It can be comforting to walk into a Vermont farmers’ market—winter or summer. Whether we’re frequent patrons or visiting from out of state, dropping by a market on a Saturday morning or Thursday afternoon can feel cozy and reassuring: all those farmers practicing healthy agriculture and guaranteeing our collective food security.

Tatiana Schreiber

Tatiana Schreiber grows and sells heirloom and unusual varieties of eggplants, peppers, and tomatoes, as well as medicinal and culinary herbs, at her farmstead, Sowing Peace Farm, in Westminster West. She also teaches ecological agriculture and other topics at local colleges.

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Written by Tatiana Schreiber | May 26, 2015

When I work in the garden, surrounded by vegetables, flowering plants, and herbs, with several species of bees buzzing in the big, purple, flowering clusters of anise hyssop at the ends of all the beds, and a breeze fluttering the leaves of the maples and oaks in the woods nearby, I sense polyphony at work in the natural world.

Written by Tatiana Schreiber | November 24, 2013

For many years environmental activists have used the term “peak oil” to refer to the coming crisis in availability of fossil fuels, and as part of a rhetorical strategy to hasten our shift toward a post-oil economy. Recently, some activists and scientists have begun to talk about another “peak” crisis: that of phosphorous.

Written by Tatiana Schreiber | January 01, 2013

Several years ago I was privileged to spend weeks and months at a time working in southern Mexico with organic coffee and cacao farmers. My first visit to a coffee farm is etched in my memory primarily through sound—the sound of bees.

Written by Tatiana Schreiber | October 25, 2012

I spent a recent morning clearing “alien” species out of one of my garden beds. By “alien” I don’t mean “non-native”; I just mean plants that I didn’t want in there, which is often what the word alien connotes: beings that don’t belong where they are. I wanted an artistic arrangement of red and green shiso in that bed (shiso is a Japanese culinary herb—or weed, or medicinal plant, depending on your point of view—that grows wild in many parts of Asia).

Written by Tatiana Schreiber | June 01, 2012

My plan was to write an interesting story about a few vegetables that have a Vermont heritage—that is, they were grown in Vermont over many years or were thought to have first been developed commercially by Vermont farmers or breeders. I was thinking of Gilfeather® turnips, Green Mountain potatoes, Chester beans, and Roy’s Calais Flint corn, as examples.

Written by Tatiana Schreiber | December 01, 2011

A sobering aspect of both the spring flooding of Lake Champlain and the devastating flood following Tropical Storm Irene is that for climate scientists working in Vermont, neither event was all that surprising.

Written by Tatiana Schreiber | September 01, 2009

A couple of years ago, as the gardening season at the Westminster West Elementary School came to a close, my fellow Master Gardener and school garden coordinator, Albin Zak, and I joined the 30 kids and their teachers for a squash-tasting event. First and second grade teacher Alison Taylor had made up recording sheets for the children to fill out as they sampled the various squashes we had prepared—they could circle the smiling faces for the squash they liked, and the frowning faces for those they didn’t.

Written by Tatiana Schreiber | September 01, 2008

I’m in the second year of my love affair with celeriac and the romance is still aflame. My initial reaction upon “discovering” this vegetable was to think, “Where have you been all my life?” Since then I have introduced my new love to many gardening friends, insisting they take home a couple of six-packs of seedlings in the spring and just have a fling. This year I also donated quite a few plants to the Westminster West School Children’s Garden, which I coordinate, to see if the kids would take to celeriac the way they now respond to kohlrabi—another somewhat “odd” vegetable that we planted together, and that has become one of their favorite raw snacks.

Written by Tatiana Schreiber | December 01, 2007

I have never thought of myself as a “spiritual” person. Although I have much admiration for the values and ethical traditions associated with the secular Judaism I was raised in, I have tended to eschew the organized aspect of religion. My secular upbringing did not prevent me, however, from noticing that the world around me was spectacularly complex and beautiful. The littlest things (a spider’s web!) inspired my utmost appreciation and respect. Later, I channeled this appreciation in the direction of science, trying to understand life processes through the study of biology and botany, microbiology and biochemistry.

Written by Tatiana Schreiber | September 01, 2007

Ever since I was in grade school and heard about Gregor Mendel and his famous hybrid sweet peas, I’ve been fascinated with the notion of conducting experiments with plants in a garden. Of course Mendel really was a scientist, while I’m something between an enthusiastic gardener and a tiny-scale farmer. I don’t expect my own experiments will yield anything as ground-breaking as the laws of heredity, but I always hope they will prove valuable in guiding my work the following year. And besides, they’re really fun!

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

What we do

A quarterly magazine devoted to covering local food, sustainable farming, and the many people building the Vermont food system.

Vermont's Local Banquet Magazine illuminates the connections between local food and Vermont communities. Our stories, interviews, and essays reveal how Vermont residents are building their local food systems, how farmers are faring in a time of great opportunity and challenge, and how Vermont’s agricultural landscape is changing as the localvore movement shapes what is grown and raised here.